Laurie Abraham talks to Harvard trained psychiatrist Mark Epstein, author of The Trauma of Everyday Life, about getting over her two-date-heartbreak

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On the train headed back home to New York City, I'm reading, or trying to read, Buddhist-influenced therapist Mark Epstein's new book, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press). I'm feeling tears gather behind my eyes, perhaps leaking out at the corners, but it's a 9 a.m. Acela, full of men in suits with briefcases—I'm not going to start weeping, not that I'm sure I could, even if I were home alone in my bedroom.

It's not the book that's getting to me, or not just that. I'd gone out with B. the night before—I traveled to Washington, DC, largely for that purpose—but this morning I awoke to an e-mail in which he said he felt terrible, but he'd met someone else right after our first date, and it was a hard decision, and "you're a great girl," but….

Let me tell you about our first date. Midway through, B. rose from the table at the Brooklyn restaurant where we'd met, walked over to my side, sat down and reached for me, and started fiercely kissing me. While planning the date—yes he, not I, had planned it—he inquired as to whether I liked steak. (It's my favorite food.) I'd discovered, through a bit of googling (only a bit, I swear—though my husband and I split a year ago, I still haven't tried online dating), that B. is something of a wine expert, and when I sat down, he asked whether I minded starting with a bottle of white and then switching to red. (Did I mind? You mean I'm not the last carnivore or lover of plentiful libations on the East Coast?) Oh, and did I mention that he does fascinating, excellent work that requires him to travel all over the globe? That he is curious? (He asked me questions and follow-ups.) That we continued making out on a bench outside the restaurant on that cool, early summer night? That when his brother drove up to retrieve him, peering at us through the car's window was B.'s niece, who'd just come from a bar mitzvah. (My elder daughter attended a gazillion bar mitzvahs this year!) That when I got home, I found an e-mail from him saying he'd return to New York in the next few weeks to see me? That in these e-mails he deemed me "magnificent," among other declarations of affection?

But could you really call my rejection by B. even a small trauma? I ask the author of The Trauma of Everyday Life when I interview him in his TriBeCa office. I mean, I went out with B. exactly twice. I'm pretty sure Mark Epstein, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who's written six books and is one of the earliest synthesizers of Eastern spirituality and Western psychotherapy, will say yes—not only because I read his book, but because I can guess how he'll respond to my queries; he's been my therapist off and on for 12 years. (So why ask him, then? Because if therapy teaches you anything, it's that you can "know" something and still find yourself needing to hear it again and again.)

And he does say yes. "Even though you only went out with B. twice," Epstein tells me, holding me in his calm gaze, "you had developed feelings for him and hopes for him, and then out of the blue to spring it on you, that's definitely a trauma."

However B. broke the bad news would have hurt, I protest, adding that my friends rightfully pointed out that B. was kind and prompt, that he didn't lead me on or try to sleep with me when he knew he planned to break it off. "So it's okay to call that little thing that happened to me a trauma, as opposed to…being pulled off the street and raped?" I blurt.

"There's a whole continuum of trauma," Epstein replies patiently. "The Buddha used the word dukkha, which means 'hard to face.' So I think that what's hard to face is traumatic. There's an instinctual feeling that we shouldn't face it, because it's difficult, so we turn away." In conventional psychological terms, which Epstein also employs freely, we "dissociate," or push off the part of ourselves that is in pain, isolate it somewhere in our subconscious. "And that turning away makes us a little more tense, a little more rigid, and a little more cut off."

In fact, I decided to write about Epstein's latest book because, in addition to addressing one of the most pressing issues of our time, the emotional impact of serious trauma, it offers a gentle yet rigorous explanation of how we limit ourselves—and, ultimately, our contributions to the human race—by fending off emotional pain, by insisting on what he calls "the rush to normal." And in an age where mindfulness, yoga, and celebrity visits to the Dalai Lama are all old hat, Epstein also corrects some widespread misimpressions about Buddhism by weaving together his interactions with clients; his own story as a young medical student riven by anxiety and uncomfortable in his own skin; and a fresh take on the story of the Buddha: namely, by focusing on the death of his mother when he was an infant and still the Prince Siddhartha.

Back on the train, Epstein's book in my hands, I endeavor to do what he has counseled over the years: just feel my sadness. I'm hurt, I'm sad, just sad—the words hover before me. I notice a sort of hollowness in my chest, a heaviness around my mouth…and then a yearning, and more words. I'm so disappointed; I had such grand plans. I want to be the one chosen. I'm so sad.

Emotions are not eloquent, as this passage amply attests, or at least their eloquence disintegrates in the movement from sensation to thought. And they're not so easy to stay with. In addition to dulling the point of the dart—only two measly dates!—other thoughts flickered in and out of my awareness as Chesapeake Bay whooshed by. Maybe I was too much for B., too tough-reporter girl, and failed to show my tender side. Or maybe I spoke too candidly of intimations of mortality—admitted that I'd begun considering how I wanted to spend my last 30 or so years on this earth. Again, too much, Laurie. You hardly knew the guy! And so on.

Buddhism teaches, Epstein writes in the first chapter of his book, that "trauma, in any of its forms, is not…something to be ashamed of, not a sign of weakness, and not a reflection of inner failing. It is simply a fact of life."

But, I practically screech at him in his office, how will I change my behavior (for the next date, say) if I don't critique myself? If I don't learn from what I did wrong?

"Well," he says, "if you're worried that you're not showing your soft side, if there's any truth in that"—he's skeptical that this is a big problem for me, I know from our past conversations—"then your being able to experience, just pure and simple, your sadness on the train, that's a softening, right?"

"Yeees," I groan. I'm used to him turning my arguments on their head, delicately reframing the terms to give me a jolt of insight.

What I was doing on the train, I realize only in retrospect, was a truncated version of what Tibetan Buddhism calls mindfulness meditation (although I'm not a Buddhist and I don't meditate, despite a couple of attempts to start, which doesn't seem to bother Epstein in the least).

The way mindfulness is often described—you're to focus on a neutral object, such as the breath, and observe emotions, bodily sensations, and thoughts as they present themselves—has puzzled me as much as it entices me. How can you watch your feelings and feel them at the same time? To me, it carries the whiff of an elaborate avoidance technique.

With mindfulness, Epstein explains in his office, "you learn to sort of ride the waves of emotion longer than you normally would. Sometimes there are cascades of feeling; sometimes it quiets down and goes away." (I've noticed, actually, that if I really let myself cry, the tears can dry up surprisingly quickly. There just wasn't as much there as I'd imagined.)

"Sometimes," Epstein goes on, "there's a very strong feeling of being aggrieved: 'How could he treat me this way?' And with Buddhist training you learn to focus on the feeling of self, which can be very strong. But Buddhism teaches that self is an illusion, so what is it you're feeling there? Do I exist or do I not exist when somebody has hurt my feelings?"

One armchair criticism I've heard of Buddhism is that it's a form of escape, from yourself, from the ugliness of existence, and Epstein says that many people are indeed drawn to it—he himself initially was—for transcendence, as a tool to become "calm and clear."

"There are stories from the [meditation] retreat center where I go about people who have gone for three months and are very high the entire time," he tells me, "and then the retreat ends, and 12 hours later they're freaking out, running to the teacher, saying, 'It didn't work, it didn't work,' because the high is gone."

Epstein is critical of this because he thinks mystical states are as dissociative as any other defense one might throw up to push away pain (not to mention that it runs counter to Buddhist teaching). So what's behind all this feeling, the close attention to it?

It's just a means to live fully in the present, with as much kindness toward oneself and others as possible, Epstein says, distilling the Buddha's teaching into a few words. While Western therapeutic models often view expressing emotion as cathartic—you've cleared out the "bad" so you can feel "good"—the Buddhist stance is to discourage "clinging" to happiness, or to suffering, for that matter. (The Buddha spent years in the wilderness starving and otherwise punishing himself before rejecting that as a path to enlightenment.)

For Buddhists, this lack of clinging extends to the recognition of our own impermanence. The no-frills translation: We're going to die. Talk about sad and scary—dwelling on this thought at all can make me start wringing my hands in agitation…or searching for a bottle of wine. But in his book Epstein relates a koan offered by a Buddhist master that comforted me, suggesting as it does how facing the inevitability of what you might call the ultimate trauma adds a level of meaning to existence. As Epstein recalls it, he and some fellow travelers asked the teacher, who lived in a monastery in Thailand, what he'd learned over the years.

"He motioned to a glass at his side," Epstein writes. " Do you see this glass?…I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters…. But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious."

For years, Epstein has worked with a woman who lost her husband, both her young sons, and her mother and father when the seaside hotel in which they were all staying was hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Sonali Deraniyagala miraculously survived and was found clinging to a branch two miles inland. While Epstein doesn't name her in his book, she credits him in her memoir, Wave (Knopf).

In Deraniyagala's literally breathtaking work—the extent of her loss still makes me gasp—she recounts how for a very long time she could not bear the thought of her sons. Not the thought, nor the sight, sound, smell, taste of anything that reminded her of them. Basically, she could not bear getting up in the morning, so she doused her awareness with alcohol and pills.

Eventually, through writing about her family members and in the cocooning confines of Epstein's basement office, she let each of them back in, bit by bit, allowing herself to feel the love she'd known.

To a mother, like me—to anyone, I'd guess—this is the most horrifying example of the kind of horrors the word trauma is often used for: events that trauma specialist and psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow, whose work Epstein frequently references, says make people feel devastatingly alone, outside of "consensual reality."

Stolorow writes, "When a person says to a friend…, 'I'll see you in the morning,' these are statements, like delusions, that allow one to function in the world." Emotional trauma obliterates these "absolutisms." Or, as Epstein observes, "it reveals truth, but in a manner so abrupt and disturbing that the mind jumps away." Which is what happened to Deraniyagala, of course.

The truth he is referring to is the Buddhist idea of our impermanence, our lack of control, and while only the most sadistic sadist would ever urge anyone to embrace such a path to knowledge, I ask Epstein back in his office if maybe small traumas—like having a guy you dated twice dump you—are good for you.

You don't have to gin up traumas, Epstein replies; they're a rule of living. But he knows what I'm getting at, that feeling our way into our own traumas, some of which are a normal part of development—when, for example, a baby's needs aren't perfectly met, no matter how well-meaning her parents—opens us to our common humanity.

Which is what I glimpsed after my train ride. Having kept my disappointment and sorrow as close as my mind would allow over the three-hour trip, I disembarked and plunged into the roiling mass that is Penn Station. When my rather regal grandmother used to say, "I don't like people, I like particular people," I'd identified with her pinched point of view. But in this moment, I couldn't have comprehended it, because each person I saw, and I really looked as I walked to the subway station to catch my next ride, seemed so interesting and alive, so worthy of curiosity and concern. It seemed a little like I was glowing, or maybe they were, as if the phrase "my heart goes out to them" were literal, because I wanted to offer myself to each fellow soul. I felt what Stolorow calls the "unbearable embeddedness of being," unbearable because, Epstein writes, it betrays at once "our powerlessness, our inability to exist independently" and the beautiful, aching poignancy of our connection with others.